If you’re anything like the readers who wrote to me last week, you were pleasantly surprised — dare I say, delighted — to find a four-page special section wrapped around last Sunday’s Dispatch highlighting a key moment in Ohio State’s dramatic win over Michigan.

The question some asked: How did you do that?

As you might expect, pulling off such a feature requires a lot of planning, coordination, powerful images and time. The newsroom worked with our production team to configure the press run so that we could have color where we needed it to satisfy the needs of the newsroom and our advertisers.

Two of our best people — Mary Lynn Plageman, our managing editor/features, and Todd Bayha, an assistant art director — came in on their day off to work with the photo team to create those memorable pages. The images had to lend themselves to the format and had to be powerfully story-telling to be successful. Photographer Kyle Robertson captured both of those images for us — and you.

Some might wonder why today’s edition doesn’t include such a “wrap.” The answer is a four-letter word: Time.

Because yesterday’s game was scheduled to kick off at 8:17 p.m., that didn’t allow us enough time to handle the design, find the perfect photos and perform the other work that goes into such a section without guaranteeing extremely late home deliveries for everyone.

As it is, we took a slight risk last night and delayed the start of our presses so we could publish the results of Ohio State’s first-ever Big Ten championship game in every edition. I wrote this before the game against Michigan State, so I hope the game moved along quickly and your newspaper was on time.

If not, please don’t blame your carrier. Blame me and my colleagues in production and circulation for trying to provide every Buckeyes fan a historic keepsake. Better yet, blame the Big Ten for starting the game so late.

• • •

After many years of writing these columns, I’ve learned that you appreciate when we explain the reasons behind our decisions.

Believe it or not, the Michigan game provided an ethical issue for us, or at least a judgment call on good taste.

One of the big moments in the game was a fight that led to the ejection of two Ohio State players. One of those players, lineman Marcus Hall, made an inappropriate gesture to fans as he left Michigan Stadium.

Our photographers captured his two-digit salute (one on each hand), but we didn’t publish any of those photos.

Journalists like to debate the merits of such images. Without question, the photo was provocative and reflected exactly what many people were talking about — two things we look for when deciding which stories to pursue or photographs to publish.

The determining factor for us in deciding whether to print the photo was whether its publication would provide a deeper understanding of the situation or if using it would be merely gratuitous.

One of the images, captured by Robertson, shows a Michigan fan in the front row offering his own salute to Hall. Others nearby are pointing at the ejected player, while still others look on in shock. Unlike some photos of the moment that I’ve seen on websites, our image didn’t focus solely on Hall; rather, it provided context and a broader sense of the emotion, which seemingly were reasons to print it.

But in each of the replays of the incident I’ve seen on TV, the networks blurred out Hall’s hands so that viewers were unable to see the actual salute. If we had wanted to print the image, we’d have needed to blur the hands as well to avoid offending readers (even if Hall already did offend folks on live television). That being the case, what would be the value in printing it?

We decided there was no value.

No one who saw it will forget what Hall did. Our deciding not to publish it won’t make the blemish on his career go away, either.

For those keeping score, we didn’t publish a photo of a professional golfer who made the same gesture years ago at a golf tournament held in town. It failed the same test as this one.

Benjamin J. Marrison is editor of The Dispatch. You can read his blog at dispatch.com/blogs.